Hubble: Space Doesn't Really Look Like That!

So the pretty pictures from Hubble are just that--pretty pictures. Space doesn't look like the photos we see.

There's a dirty little secret when it comes to the stunning images produced by the Hubble Space Telescope. They're not real. Honest. The scientists connected with Hubble take liberties no journalist would ever get away with--though in the name of science.

Do a Google search for "hubble space telescope "false color"" and you'll get nearly 100,000 entries with phrases like "This false color mosaic was made by combining multiple Hubble Space Telescope images," or, "This false-color image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope using infrared light," or even "Our massive stars make up the bright yellow area in the center of this false-color image."

This leaves two important questions: how and why?

NASA says Hubble's cameras capture in black and white. That's not quite right. Hubble picks up all the different wavelengths of light we see plus more we can't on either side of our limited range. Filters, pretty simple stuff all things considered, limit which frequencies Hubble can see at any given time.

That means sometimes Hubble takes pictures of things we can't see! How exactly do you show that? Here's an example with an infrared photo of Saturn.

We assigned the color blue to the shortest-wavelength infrared light, red to the longest-wavelength infrared light, and green to the intermediate-wavelength infrared light.

They could have just as easily inverted the color selections! Humans are at work. Objective and subjective decisions were made to get the most meaningful images. For the Cat's Eye Nebula color was added and enhanced to make "delicate structures more obvious."

By limiting the bandpass to Hubble's optics elementary interstellar chemistry can be displayed in ways never before possible. Oxygen, for instance, can be isolated and shown. Astronomers can visualize concepts that aren't truly visible! It's heady stuff.

So the pretty pictures from Hubble are just that--pretty pictures. Space just doesn't look like that.